The best use of our technology enhances our humanity. Telling stories establishes computers as a communications medium, prevents each one of us from being labeled a number, passive recipients of media marketing. If we all have a place to publish, the Plugged-In channel, the GK Darby channel, there’s no way the Web will end up as banal and mediocre as television.
Cyberspace is a geography constructed of information, a new planet with an atmosphere no less breathable for being imaginary. Its topography is undeveloped, as yet still locked into the intrinsic dimensions of its nodal points. It lies compressed and unrealized in our vaults of tapes and discs of data, in our books and dreams, in the very way we appear to each other on screens, pages and telephone lines. To unfurl and organize all this, to bring it to light in cyberspace, spatiology must complement archeology, immersion must complement observation.
The possibility that the future Internet (or whatever replaces it) may be dominated by monolithic corporate-controlled electronic consumer shopping malls and amusement parks is antithetical to the existence and activity of free individuals in the electronic communications world, each one able to interact freely with other individuals and groups there.
Someday you’ll be backing an 18-year-old who’s writing software that will change the world.
Cyberspaces will require constant planning and management. The structures proliferating within it will require design, and the people who design these structures will be called cyberspace architects … Theirs will be the task of visualizing the intrinsically non-physical and giving inhabitable form to society’s most intricate abstractions, processes, and organs of information. And all the while they will be re-realizing in a virtual world, in cyberspace, many vital aspects of the physical world, in particular those orderings and pleasures which have always belonged to architecture and the artifactual landscape.
In the future, the Internet will certainly feature many small, homegrown, regional commercial systems … Internet voyagers will drop in to visit the unique communities they find outside their home systems, sampling the local cultural flavors and meeting and conversing with the individuals who inhabit those systems. The main attractions of these local Internet “towns” will prove to be their characteristic online conversations and social conventions and their focus on specialized fields of knowledge or problem solving.
There may well be hundreds of cyberspace domains someday, with unique cultures and purposes, like countries.
More deregulation awaits us. This will mean the end of cable company monopolies, and the beginning of a new era of computer-integrated interactive entertainment, consumerism, and education.
Without some safeguards, the Internet could “collapse in a flurry of useless information.” As more and more business is conducted electronically, millions of transaction details are being stored in databases every day. “Everything could be recorded and collected and exchanged.”
If you were asked to pay 5 cents to read something online, would you? A quarter? It won’t seem like much to either party – but when you consider thousands of such transactions a day … Before searching for stuff or plunging into a new Web site, you will have to judge its worth according to your information budget. Perhaps it will lead to healthy moderation of online hours. More likely, it will be a punch in the stomach of a body that breathes information.